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BURNSIANA. 

SPEECHES 

OF 

Prof. JOHN WILSON, Rev. Dr. WALLACE, 

Gen. JAS. A. GARFIELD, Hon. S. S. COX, 
Hon. W. p. FRYE, Hon. J. PROCTOR KNOTT, 

AND OTHERS, 
WITH 

Poems on I^urns, 

BY 

MONTGOMERY, HALLECK and CAMPBELL. 

Published hy order of the Burns Club of Washington. 



GIBSON BROTHEES. PRINTERS. 

1877. 



SPEECHES 



PsoF. JOHN WILSON, Rev. Dr. WALLACE, 

Gen. JAS. A. GARFIELD, Hon. S. S. COX, 
Hon. W. p. FRYE, Hon. J. PROCTOR KOOTT, 

AND OTHEES, 



Poems on Burns 



MONTGOMERY, HALLECK and CAMPBELL. 






Pu^li^hed by order of the Burns Club of WKstef^^sT 



GIBSON BKOTHEltS, PEINTEES. 
1877. 



<^ 



^ 



At a meeting of the Burns Club of Washington, April lo, 1876, 3> 
committee was directed to publish in book form, as a contribution to Burns 
literature, the speech of John Wilson, delivered to 70,000 people congregated 
on the banks of the Doon, on the return of Burns' son from India, in 1844, 
which has never been published in this country ; the great oration of Dr. 
Wallace, delivered in Edinburgh, on Burns' birth-day, 1872 ; together with 
the speeches delivered and letters read before the Club on various anniversary 
occasions by the following distinguished statesmen and orators : Gen. Jas. A. 
Garfield, Hon. J. G. Blaine, Prof. James Monroe, Hon. S. S. Cox, Hon. 
W. P. Frye, Hon. J. Proctor Knott, and others. 

The names of the above well-known orators, statesmen, and essayists are a 
sufficient guarantee that the contents of this little volume will make an excellent 
addenda to every addition of the poet's works. 

The keen analysis of J. Proctor Knott, the natural eloquence of W. P. 
Frye, the witticisms of S. S. Cox, the scholarly parallels of Jas. A. Garfield, 
and the other distinguished gentlemen who have spoken for Burns at the National 
Capital, are worthy of America. The progressive religious thought in the oration 
of the Rev. Dr. Wallace is inimitable in its way, and well worthy a place in 
connection with the masterly speech of glorious old Christopher North. 

As a prelude, we give the poem of James Montgomery : 

ROBERT BURNS. 



What bird in beauty, flight, or song, 
v^an with the bard compare. 

Who sang as sweet, and soar'd as 
strong 
As ever child of air? 

His plume, his note, his form, could 
Burns 

For whim or pleasure change : 
He was not one, but all by turns. 

With transmigration strange. 

The Blackbird, oracle of spring. 
When flower'H his moral lay ; 

The Swallow, wheeling on the wing, 
Capriciously at play. 

The Humming-bird, from bloom to 
bloom. 

Inhaling heavenly balm ; 
The Raven, in the tempest's gloom ; 

The Halcyon in the calm. 

In " auld Kirk AUoway," the Owl, 
At witching time of night; 

By " bonnie Doon," the earliest Fowl 
That carroU'd to the light. 

He was th"^ Wren amidst the grove. 
When in his homely vein ; 



At Bannockburn the Bird of Jove, 
With thunder in his train ; 



The Woodlark, in his mournful hours; 

The Goldfinch, in his mirth ; 
The Thrush, a spendthrift of his 
power. 

Enrapturing heaven and earth ; 

The Swan, in majesty and grace, 

Contemplative and still ; 
But roused, — no Falcon, in the chase. 

Could like his satire kill. 

The Linnet in simplicity. 

In tenderness the Dove ; 
But more than all besides was he. 

The Nightingale in love. 

Oh ! had he never stooped to shame. 

Nor lent a charm to vice, 
How had devotion loved to name 

That Bird of Paradise ! 



Peace to the dead! — In Scotia's choir 
Of Minstrels great and small, 

He sprang from his spontaneous fire. 
The Phoenix of them all. 






\ 



Npeeches on |jurns, 



A GRAND demonstration in honor of the genius of 
Robert Burns was suggested to the people of Scot- 
land by the arrival from India of Col. William Burns, 
the poet's second son. August 6, 1844, was selected 
as a national holiday in Scotland. The great festival 
was presided over by the Earl of Eglinton, supported by 
hundreds of the nobility and men of letters, whose 
names filled columns of the public journals of that time. 
We select from the able speeches made on the occasion 
that of Prof. John Wilson, of Blackwood's Magazine : 

Were this festival to commemorate the genius of Burns, 
and it were asked what need is there of such commemoration, 
since his fame is co-extensive with the literature of our land, 
and inherent in every soul, I would answer that though ad- 
miration of the poet be indeed unbounded as the world, yet 
we, as compatriots to whom it is more especially dear, rejoice to 
see that universal sentiment concentrated in the voice of a 
great assembly of his own people — that we rejoice to meet in 
thousands to honor him who has delighted each single one of 
us all at his own hearth. But this commemoration expresses, 
too, if not a profounder, yet a more tender sentiment ; for it 
is to welcome his sons to the land which their father illus- 
trated — to indulge our national pride in a great name, while, 
at the same time, we gratify in full breasts the most pious of 
affections. It was customary, you kaow, in former times, to 
crown great poets. No such oblation honored our bard ; yet 
he, too, tasted of human applause — he enjoyed its delights, 
and he knew the trials that attend it. Which, think you, 
would he have preferred? Such a celebration as this in his 
lifetime, or fifty years after his death? I cannot doubt that 
he would have preferred the posthumous, because the finer 
incense. The honor and its object are thus seen in their just 
proportions; for death gives an elevation which the candid 
soul of the poet would have considered, and that honor he 
would have reserved rather for his manes than encountered it 

3 



with his living infirmities. And yet, could he have foreseen 
the day when they for whom his soul was often sorely troubled, 
should, after many years of separation, return to the cot where 
himself was born, and near it, within the shadow of his own 
monument, be welcomed for his sake by the lords and ladies 
of the land— and dearer still, far dearer to his manly breast, 
by the children and the children's children of people of his own 
degree, whose hearts he sought to thrill by the voice of his 
own inspirations — then surely would such a vision have been 
sweeter to his soul even than that immortal one in which the 
genius of the land bound holly round his forehead — the lyric- 
wreathed crown that shall flourish for ever. Of his three sons 
now sitting here, one only, I believe, can remember his father's 
face— can remember triose large, lustrous eyes of his, so full 
of meaning, whether darkened by thought, melting in melan- 
choly, or kindling in mirth — but never turned on his children, 
nor the mother of his childreii, but with one expression of 
tenderest, most intense afteclion. Even at this day he, too, 
may remember his father's head with its dark clusters, not 
unmixed with gray, and those eyes closed for ever, lying upon 
the bed of death; nor, should such solemn image arise, would 
it be unsuitable to this festival; for while I bid welcome to 
the sons of Burns to their father's land, I feel, I cannot but 
feel, that while you have conferied upon me a high honor, 
you have also imposed upon me a sacred duty; and however 
inadequately I may discharge it, at least I shall in no degree 
violate either the spirit of humanity or truth. In speaking of 
the character of Burns, in the presence of his sons, I must 
speak reverently; but even in their presence I must not refuse 
to speak the truth. I must speak according to the established 
and everlasting judgment of what is right. Burns had his 
faults.- Burns, like every other mortal being, had his faults, 
great faults in the eyes of men, and grievous in the eyes of 
heaven above. There is a moral in every man's life, even in 
his humblest condition, imperfectly understood; and how 
affecting is it when we read confessions wrung out by remorse 
from the souls of the greatly gifted and the gloriously en- 
dowed. But it is not his faults that are remembered here — 
surely it is not to honor these that here we meet together. To 
deny that error is error is to extenuate its blame. We make 
an outrage upon sacred truth; but to forget that it exists, or if 
that may not be wholly, so to think of it as to regard it with 
that melancholy emotion that accompanies all our medita- 
tions on the mixed character of men, that is not only allow- 
able, but it is ordered — it is a privilege dear to humanity. 
And well indeed might we tremble for him who should in 
this be dead to the voice of Nature crying from the tomb. 
And in this mark how graciously time aids the inclinations of 
charity. Its shadows soften what they may not hide; and the 
distant discords that might have grated too painfully on our 



ears are now undistin^uisbably lost in that music, sweet and 
solemn, that comes afar with the sound of a great man's 
name. It is consolatory to see how the faults of those whom 
the people honor grow fainter and more faint in the national 
memory, while their virtues grow brighter and still more 
bright; and if in this injustice has been done them — and who 
shall dare to deny that crudest injustice was once done to 
Burns — t.iie succeeding generations becume more and more 
charitable to the dead, and desire to repair the wrong by some 
profounder homage. It may be truly said "the good which 
men do lives after them." All that is etherial in their being 
alone seems to survive; and, therefore, all our cherished 
memories of our best men, and Burns was among our best, 
ought to be invested with all consistent excellencies; for far 
better do their virtues instruct us by the love which they in- 
spire than ever could their vices admonish us. To dwell on 
the goodness of the great shows that w^e ourselves are not only 
lovers of nature, but that w^e may be aspiring to reach his 
serene abode; but to dwell upon the faults of greatness, and 
still worse, to ransack, in order that we may create them, that 
is the low industry of envy, which, grown into a habit, becomes 
malice, at once hardening and embittering to the mind. Such, 
in the case of our great poet, beyond all doubt was the source 
of many a malignant truth and lie, fondly written down, 
carefully recorded, by a class of calumniators that never may 
become extinct. And for many years w^e were forced to hear 
souls ignoble, formed to be forgot, dragging forth some puny 
phantasm of their own heated fancy, as if it were the majestic 
shade of Barns, evoked from his mausoleum for contumely and 
insult. We have thus been told, by some who rather pre- 
sumptuously assume the office of our instructors, to beware 
how we allow our admiration of genius to seduce us from 
reverence of truth. We have been told how far moral is 
superior to intellectual worth ; nay, that in nature they are 
not allied. But akin in nature they are, and grief and pity 
'tis that they should ever be disunited. But mark in what a 
hateful, because hypocritical, spirit such counsels as these 
have often been preferred, till salutary truths have been per- 
verted by gross misrepresentation into pernicious falsehoods. 
They did not seek to elevate nature; they sought to degrade 
genius. And never in any instance did such men stand forth 
so glaringly self-contradicted of wretched ignorance of the 
nature of both than by this wilful perversion'^of many of the 
noblest attributes of humanity in the character of Robert 
Burns. Yes; virtue and genius are both alike from heaven, 
and both alike tend heavenward. Therefore we lament to see 
a single stain assailing the divine gift of genius — therefore we 
lament to see virtue, where no genius is, fall before the 
tempter. But let us never listen to those who, by the very 
breath of morning, would seek to blight the wreath bound 



round the forehead of the Muse's son by a people's gratitude. 
Let us beware of those who, under alEfected zeal for religion, 
have as often violated the spirit of both by gross misrepresen- 
tations and exaggerations and denunciations of the common 
frailties of our nature in illustrious men— in men who, in spite 
of their aberrations, more or less deplorable, from the right 
line of duty, were, nevertheless, like Burns, in their prevailing 
moods, devoted worshippers of virtue in the general tenor of 
their lives, and noble examples to all of their brethren. . 
Burns, who, while sorely oppressed in his own generous 
breast by the worst of anxieties — the anxiety of providing the 
means of subsistence to those of his own household and his 
own heart — was notwithstanding no less faithful to that 
sacred gift with which by heaven he had been endowed. 
Obedient to the holy inspiration, he ever sought it purely in 
the paths of poverty — to love which is indeed from heaven. 
From his inexhaustible fancy, warmed by the sunshine of his 
heart, even in the thickest gloom, he strewed along the weary 
ways of the world flowers so beautiful that even to eyes that 
weep — that are familiar with tears— they looked as if they 
were flowers dropped from heaven. But in a more humane — 
in a more christian— spirit, have men now consented to judge 
of the character of their great benefactor; therefore at an 
hazard I may call them sacred scenes, the anniversary of the 
birth or death of one who had completed so great an achieve- 
ment. But they have still sought to make manifest the honor 
they intended him — to make manifest, if possible, in some 
degree the demands made upon them by the imagination and 
the heart. In what other way than that could genius ever 
have dared to seek to perpetuate in elegies and hymns ex- 
pressive of a whole people's triumph, and a whole people's 
grief, for the death of some king, sage, priest, or poet? What 
king from the infirmities of his meanest subjects ever was 
free? We know that throbs come from a kingly heart up to 
the brow which is rounded by a kingly crown. Aye, kings 
have passions or ideas as fatal as those that torment the heart 
of the meanest kind on his pallet of straw. But then the 
king, with all his sins, had been a guardian, a restorer, a de- 
liverer; thus his sins were buried with his body, and all over 
the land— not only in his day, but in after generations — the 
cry was "O king, live for ever!" The sage has seen how 
liberty rests on law; how rights are obligations; how the pas- 
sions of men must be controlled in order that they may be 
free. He, too, how often has he struggled in vain with his 
own passions; with the powers of evil that beset him in that 
seclusion in which reverend admiration would fondly believe 
that wisdom for ever serenely dwells? The servant of God, 
has he always kept his heart pure from the earth, nor ever 
lifted up in prayer but spotless hands? The humbled confes- 
sion of his own unsvorthiness would be his reply, alike to the 



scoffer and to him that believed. But were there one afflicted 
by plague or pestilence, he had carried comfort into the house 
deserted by all, except by sin and despair — or he sailed away 
from the homes of christian men, where he had lived long in 
peace, honor, and affluence, for the sake of his divine Master, 
and for the sake of them who were sitting in darkness and the 
shadow of death; therefore shall his name be blessed, and all 
Christendom point to him as a chosen servant of God. Now, 
it might seem that there is a deep descent from these bene- 
factors of our race to those who have done other services to 
mankind by their powers of fancy and imagination, and by 
means of the created powers of God. It might so seem; but 
they, too, have been numbered among our best benefactors. 
Their graves have been visited by many a pious pilgrim from 
afar; and whether we think on the highest of them all, Milton, 
who sung things yet unattempted in prose or rhyme, and 5''et 
who was not free from the errors inseparable from the storms 
of civil war which then raged, even to the shedding of the 
blood of kings — down to England's beloved illustrious min- 
strel — Wordsworth — descending from height to height in the 
regions of song — we find that our love and gratitude is due to 
them as benefactors of our species. And among such bene- 
factors who will deny that Burns is entitled to a place— w^ho 
reconciled poverty to its lot, who lightened the burden of care, 
made toil charmed with its very task-work, and at the same 
time almost reconciled grief to the grave; who by one im- 
mortal song has sanctified for ever the poor man's cot, and by 
a picture which genius alone, inspired by piety, could have 
conceived, a picture so tender and yet so true of that happy 
night, that it seems to pass, by some sweet transition, from 
the working vvorld into that hallowed day of God's appoint- 
ment, and made to breathe a heavenly calm— a holj'- serenity? 
Now, I hold that such sentim.ents as these which I have ex- 
pressed, if they be true, afford a justification at once of the 
character of Burns— his moral and intellectual character — that 
places him beyond the possibility of detraction, among the 
highest order of human beings who have benefited their race 
by the expressions of noble sentiment and glorious thoughts. 
I fear I am trespassing on j^our time too much, but I would 
fain keep your attention for a very short time htnger, while I 
say that there is a voice heard above and below and round 
about — the voice of mere admiration, as it has been expressed 
by men of taste and criticism. There is a voice which those who 
listen to it can hear — a voice which has pronounced its judg- 
ment on the character of Burns — a judgment which cannot on 
earth be carried to a higher tribunal, and which never will be 
reversed. It was heard of old, and struck terror into the 
hearts of tyrants, who quaked and quailed and fled for fear 
from this land before the unconquered Caledonian spear. It 
is a voice they were pleased to hear; it was like the sound of 



distant waterfalls, the murmurs of tlie summer woods, or the 
voice of the mighty sea which ever rolls even on, I mean the 
voice of the people of Scotland, of her peasantry and trades, 
of all who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow ; me 
voice of the working men. I shall not pretend to draw their 
character; this I may say of them now, and boldly, that they 
do BOt choose to be dictated to as to the choice of those who 
with them shall be a household word. They are men from 
whose hands easier would jt be to wrench the weapon than 
ever to wreoch their worship from their hearts. They are men 
who loved truth, sincerity, integrity, resolution, and inde- 
pendence — an open front, and a bold eye, that fears not to 
look on the face of clay. They do not demand, in one and 
the same person, inconsistent virtues; they are no lovers of 
perfection or of perfectibility ; they know that there are 
fainter and darker shadows in the character of every man; and 
they seem, as we look back on their history, to have loved 
most those who have been subject most within and without to 
strong and severe temptatioD. Whether in triumph or in 
valor, they have shown at least, by the complexion of charac- 
ter of their souls, that they loved their country, and had no 
other passion so strong as the defence of the people. Aye I 
they too, unless 1 am mistaken, loved those who had struggled 
with adversity. They loved those who have had their trials, 
their griefs, their sorrows; and, most of all, they loved those 
who were not ashamed of confessing that they were so, and 
who threw themselves on the common feelings and forgiveness 
here below, and trusted for forgiveness on other principles 
and feelings altogether to that source from which alone it can 
come. The love of the people of Scotland for those whom 
they have loved has not been exclusive — it has been compre- 
hensive. They left the appearance of their different charac- 
ters, and honored them for every advance they made, provided 
they saw the strength of character, moral and intellectual. 
Such a people as this, possessing such feelings, could not but 
look upon Robert Burns, and while they admired him they 
also loved him with the truest affection, as well for the virtues 
as for the sorrows and the griefs of that great, but in some 
respects unfortunate, man. Was he worthy of their love? 
Taking it for granted, and we are entitled to do so — then why 
did they love him ? They loved him because he loved his own 
order, nor ever desired, for a single hour, to quit it. They 
loved him because he loved the very humblest condition of 
humanity so much, that by his connection he saw more truly 
and became more distinctly acquainted with what was truly 
good, and imbued with a spirit of love in the soul of a man. 
They loved him for that which he had sometimes been most 
absurdly questioned for — his independence. They loved him 
for bringing sunshine into dark places; not for representing 
the poor hard-working man as an object of pity — but for show- 



icg that there was something more than is dreamed of in the 
world's philosophj' among the tillers of the soil and the hum- 
blest children of the laud. From such a clmracter as that 
which I have truly given Scotland's people, one would expect 
that all their poetry would be of a stern or furious kind, the 
poetry only of bloodshed and destruction; but it was not so, 
nor is it so, but with some gloj-ious exceptions in the poetiy 
of Burns. For how did the men of old love poetry, and was 
it loved in the huts where they were born? Yes, Poetr}^ was 
the produce both of the heathery mountains and the broomy 
braes. In the days of old they had their music plaintive and 
dirge-like, as it sighed for the absent or wailed for the dead. 
These fragments, while they were fluttering about in disorder 
and decay, were seized upon by him, the sweetest lyrist of 
them all, and sometimes, by the change of a single word, he 
let in the soul of beauty — scmietimes by a few^ happy touches 
of his genius he changed the fragment into a whole so ex- 
quisitely moulded that no one could tell which were the lines 
belonging to Burns and which to the poet of ancienr days. 
But all of them now belong to Burns, for he has rescued them 
from oblivion. He also took the music, and set the unlettered 
language of nature to every necessary modulation of human 
speech, so that the poetry of Burns is as popular and as 

national as his music. 

•5fr ^j * * -x- * 

Robert Burns, son of the poet, in reply, said : 

I am sure the sons of Burns feel all that they ought on an 
occasion so gratifying, on which so nobly generous a welcome 
has been given them to the banks of Doon. Wherever they 
have gone they have found a reception prepared for them by 
the genius and fame of their father, and under the providence 
of God, they owe to the admirers of his genius all that they 
have, and what competencies they now enjoy. We have no 
claim to attention individually; we are all aware that genius, 
and more particularly poetic genius, is not hereditary — and in 
■this case the mantle of Elijah has not descended upon Eligha. 
The sons of Burns have grateful hearts, and will remember, 
so long as they live, the honor w^hich has this day been con- 
ferred upon them by the noble and the illustrious of our own 
land, and many generous and kind spirits from other lands — 
some from the far West, a country composed of the great and 
the free, and altogether a kindred people. We beg to return 
our most heartfelt thanks to this numerous and highly respect- 
able company for the honor which has been done as this day. 



10 

At the Birthday Celebration in Edinburgh, January 
25, 1872, Dr. Wallace spoke ''To the memory of 
Burns," as follows : 

Some people think that a demonstration like the present, to 
commemorate the work done by Robert Burns, not only for 
Scotland but for mankind, is a proceeding that ought not to 
take place, and that cannot be defended. We are charged 
with practising the idolatry of genius. That, I believe, is the 
usual phrase. I am not sure that I exactly understand its- 
meaning. In its literal interpretation it is nonsensical. Idol- 
atry means religious adoration presented in a certain supersti- 
tious form; and it need searcely be said that the better one 
understands and sympathizes with the ideas and spirit of 
Burns, the less will he be inclined to regard any creature, hu- 
man or otherwise, with sentiments of that description. Ac- 
cordingly, I presume, that this idolatry of genius must be a fig- 
urative mode of denoting the admiration of intellectual power, 
apart from its moral character, in spite of disastrous influences 
exerted by it on the happiness or highest well-being of man- 
kind. That the genius of Burns was splendid enough to excite 
this undiscriminating admiration in minds incapable of dis- 
crimination is not to be doubted ; but had he really profaned 
his great and sacred gifts, and made himself a power for evil, 
I trust that none of us would have been here to do honor to his 
memory. But if his genius was a beneficent as well as a bril- 
liant force in history, then it was a force upon so great a scale, 
of so exquisite a quality, and dealing so searchingiy with sub- 
jects of the deepest human interest, that the good it wrought, 
necessarily corresponding in its magnitude, must evoke some 
expression of grateful admiration from all whose sensibilities, 
qualify them for its proper recognition. It is the fact that the 
genius of Burns dealt fearlessly Vith the most awful questions 
of human destiny; investigated with original inquiry the mean- 
ing and the true aim and method of life; tasted every experi- 
ence of mirthful, sad, and tender emotion; and gave out its 
impressions and conclusions in a wealth of thought, a beauty 
of form, and a rnemorableness of phrase that have proved au 
irresistible charm; and if, as I most certainly believe, this 
charm was on the side of good, I am not going to be such a 
stock or stone, or such a worse than senseless thing, as to make 
no sign of appreciation; and I will not submit to the insult of 
being called an idolater, a worshipper of mere power, because 
in the customajy symbols of rejoicing I seek to signify ni}^ 
gratitude for almost the greatest blessing the human race can 
receive from its Maker — a great poet who is faithful to his vo- 
cation, a master-spirit who has known how to give truth and 
sympathy a universal and enduring hold over the hearts of 
men by interweaving them with the graces of immortal song. 
We thank Heaven, and rightly, for our very meat and drink — 
are we to be dumb over a gift like Burns? 



11 

Let me take up that aspect of the subject which a person of 
my profession naturally regards witk most interest, and in 
which he feels most at home — the religious and moral influence 
of Burns. Was that a good, as it was inevitably a powerful in- 
fluence? No man should be here who has doubts upon this 
point, for if Burns was a power for evil in religion and moral- 
ity, nothing else that he said or did could atone for this dam- 
ning offence. But he needs no apology. With all respect to 
various religious persons who think otherwise, I aflirm my 
conviction that the literary influence of Burns on the spirit of 
religion is as valuable as it is great. Like every great poet. 
Burns was a preacher, and in his highest inspirations spoke to 
the soul. He was not a conventional preacher certainly. He 
laid about him in a style that would not have commended him 
to many Presbyteries of the Bounds. Old women of all kinds, 
and people of that common and coarse zeal M^iich is color-blind 
to wit, humor, and the idea of art, naturally regard liis unce- 
remonious handling of their favorites as utter profanity. But 
to those who are able to place themselves at his point of view, 
and really understand him, a spirit of lofty, if often severe and 
indignant, religiousness breathes through the collective poetry 
whose publication he himself sanctioned, and which alone can 
be fairly taken as representing his true mind. He has pon- 
dered deeply the mystery of life and of death; he has recog- 
nized a presiding order in the world, which he identifles with 
a living love; he has persuaded himself that justice and judg- 
ment are the habitation of His throne; in the faith of this he 
accepts his lot without complaint, congratulates himself on its 
compensations, awaits with confidence the coming of a better 
day, if not here, then in that sphere of immortal being to the 
hope of which he unswervingly clings, and consoles himself 
amidst the uninstructed or hasty condemnation of society by 
an appeal to the impartial judgment of Omniscience; he ac- 
knowledges the imperativeness of duty; and while refusing 
most properly to humble himself in matters of error before 
other men, without taking their respective natures and circum- 
stances into account, yet before the eye of the Eternal Holiness 
he admits his own responsibility for his own evil with penitent 
humility — 

" Where with intention I have erred. 
No other plea I have 
But Thou art good : and goodness still 
Delighteth to forgive." 

There are three species of fools that receive no encourage- 
ment, but much reproof, from the genuine and cliaracteristic 
teaching of Burns— the fool that hath said in his lieart there 
is no God, the fool that makes a mock at sin, and the fool that 
refuses to say " Thy will be done." These are really the great 
practical questions of all religion, and the man is either unpar- 



12 

donably unjust, or un noticeably stupid, who will insinuate that 
these questions are treated by Burns otherwise than with the 
reverence that befits their import, and with an intensity of 
feeling and aptness of language that will outlive far-oflf genera- 
tions of professional preachers. Surely it is no small contri- 
bution to the influence of religion to have engraved on the 
hearts of a whole people such words as these: 

" The great Creator to revere 

Must sare become the creature, 
But still the preaching can't forbear, 

And e'en the rigid feature ; 
Yet ne'er with wits profane to range, 

Be complaisance extended ; 
An Atheist-laugh's a poor exchange 

For Deity ofiended. 
When ranting round in pleasure's ring 

Religion may be blinded ; 
Or if she gi'e a random sting. 

It may be little minded ; 
But when on life we're tempest-driven, 

A conscience but a canker, 
A correspondence fix'd wi' heaven 

Is sure a noble anchor." 

Or to have given currency to such a philosophy of life as this : 

"Then let us cheerfu' acquiesce, 
Nor make our scanty pleasures less 

By pining at our state ; 
And even should misfortunes come, 
I here wha sit ha'e met wi' some, 

An's thankfu' fer them yet ; 
They gi'e the wit o' age to youth. 

They let us ken oursel', 
They make us see the naked truth. 
The real guid and ill. 
Tho' losses and crosses be lessons riajht severe, 
There's wit there ye'Il get there ye'll find nae other where." 

Or to have popularized such an example of the true method of 
fighting with our own evil as this : 

"Fain would I say ' Forgive my foul offence,' 

Fain promise never more to disobey : 
But, should my Author health ag:ain dispense. 

Again I misjht desert fair Virtue's way — 
Again in Folly's path might go astray — 

Again exalt the* brute and sink the man. 
Then how should I for heavenly mercy pray. 

Who act so counter Heavenly mercy's plan ? 
Who sin so oft have mourned, yet to temptation ran ? 

O Thou, Great Governor of all below. 
If I may dare a lifted eye to Thee, 

Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow, 
Or still the tumult of the raging sea ; 

With that controlling power assist even me 



13 

Those headlono; furious passions to confine— 

For all unfit I feel my powers to be 
To rule their torrent in th' allowed line— 

O, aid me with thy help, Omnipotence Divine." 

The man who drives from his sympathy and love a nature 
from whose inmost being such utterances come stamped with 
the impress of living sincerity, and who says to him, "Stand 
by! for I am holier than thou," has learned his Christianity in 
a school where I, for one, desire to take no lessons. 

But it is said Burns was unsound; his creed was very scanty. 
Certainly his creed did not contain anything like thirty-nine 
articles, and I cannot say that what he had was orthodox ac- 
cording to the standard of Westminster. He was a latitudina- 
rian; he was a heretic; he had no particular reverence for the 
artificialities of ecclesiasticism. But surely the day is past for 
measuring the influence of men upon the religious spirit of 
their time by the particular side which they espouse in the 
many-angled duel of polemical divinity. We are accustomed 
now to believe that a good man will do good, whatever theol- 
ogy he work with; that we may take in influences of piety 
even from the devoutness of heathenism, and receive stimulus 
in duty from contemplating 

. . . " The moral works 
Of black Gentoos and pagan Turks." 

We regard simply with amusement the remarkable person 
who looks upon all the world as the enemies of God, excepting 
himself and the members of his own little persuasion. But in 
Barns' day this idea had to be done battle for. Burns had to 
fight with people who maintained that a man's orthodoxy, or 
the reverse, formed an essential element in his salvation or per- 
dition. He certainly never scrupled to maintain the contrary. 
He declares continually that the judgment to be passed on any- 
individual before God and man turns not upon his opinions, 
but his character; not upon his faith, but his faithfulness; not 
upon the rightness or wrongness of his metaphysics, but upon 
the goodness or badness of his spirit. That we are able, in 
this country, to aflirm and act upon this idea without much 
fear of annoyance, we owe, in no small degree, to the clear- 
sightedness of Burns' intellect, the healthiness of his moral in- 
stincts, and the courage with which he asserted his conviction, 
amidst a community in which the necessary connection be- 
tween soundness and safety was more rigidly insisted on than 
anywhere else in Protestant Christendom. 

in the light of this idea, we are entitled to put out of ac- 
count Burns' special theological opinions in estimating his in- 
fluence upon the national religiousness in its vital character. 
He had the same right to his own dogmatic scheme that is pos- 
sessed by any other polemical writer. The question is. How 
did he urge it? Was he painstaking or superficial? Was he 



14 

frivolous or serious? Was he honest or sophistical? Can any 
man who has read Burns intelligently hesitate about the 
answer? His theology, such as it is, is his own. It is not a 
parrot's lesson, committed to memory and believed, or at- 
tempted to be believed, on simple authority. It is the fruit of 
his own intensest mental toil exercising itself in a hunger and 
thirst after truth and reality on such materials as lay within 
his reach. I wish I could believe that those who condemn 
him have thought for themselves with a tithe of his earnestness 
on the great pi-obiems of religion. Then look at the zeal, the 
fervor, Ihe fury of sincerity with which he advocates his views. 
You cannot say. here is a mere shallow trifler, a heartless 
scoffer. No I You ma\- dislike what he says, but you must 
see that with .all his heart he believes it, and that his fierce 
warmth and energy spring from his conviction that it would be 
well for you if you believed it too. Consider also the entire 
and uncalculating honesty with which he spoke his mind. 
Well was he entitled to denounce with an unsurpassed — I had 
almost said unsurpassable — vehemence of withering sarcasm 
the wretched vices of cant and hypocrisy — not only tbe wicked 
cant and hypocrisj- which is used by its selfish practiser as an 
instrument' for oppressing others, but also the weak yet well- 
meaning cant and hypocrisy which is employed merely for the 
sake of ^peace or self-defence. Burns was patient of neither. 
He abhorred the one as base and essentially diabolical, and he 
scourged it as near to death as it will go ; lie despised the other 
as unmanly, and rebuked it as opposed to the progress and best 
interests of man. And he qualified himself for this oflice by 
being himself utterly open and frank with the world. Xo one 
can ^y to him, "Physician, heal thyself." He has said some- 
where : 

*' At free affhan' your story tell 
When wi* a bosom crony ; 
But still keep something io yoursel' 
Ye scarcely tell tae ony.'' 

The rule is a good one for private life; but for the prophet, 
the teacher of mankind, concealment of his thoughts is treach- 
ery to society. And in his public relations Burns did not 
"still keep something to himser." If ever a great human soul 
was freely and fully unveiled for the delight or the instruction 
of the world it was the soul of Burns. 

And will any man tell me that such a way of handling the 
topics of religion is not supremely wholesome — nay. supremely 
necessary? Have we not enough of spiritual sneaking and sub- 
mission to authority? enough of simpering or stupid indiffer- 
ence to the whole subject? enough of sliam earnestness and 
unctuous make-l>elieve, of deliberately selfish, or weakly pru- 
dential pretence? Are we not the better of a visitation by a 
spirit of power like that of Burns, self-reliant and original, pas- 
sionately earnest, severely, nay relentlessly, veracious? The 



15 

blast may be keen, but it kills the germs of corruption; the 
draught may be bitter, but the end of it is health. I am well 
aware that to claim the author of the "Holy Fair," "The 
Ordination," the " Address to the Unco Guid," the "Dedica- 
tion to Gavin Hamilton," and "Holy Willie's Prayer " (though 
Burns never gave that to the world) as exercising a salutary 
intiuence upon religion, seems to many people paradoxical, if 
not profane. And so it would be if religion were simply a 
thing for childish men and the weaker order of women. I can 
quite understand that they should be scandalized beyond meas- 
ure by Burns. But religion is for mature and strong natures 
as well as for the juvenile and the feeble. It is long since it 
w^as known that there must be milk for babes and strong meat 
for men. It is right not to offend the little ones unnecessarily, 
but we cannot let the weak brother have everything his own 
way. In private it may be demanded by kindness to avoid 
chafing his tender skin, but the public teacher must not keep 
him exclusivel}' in view, but set forth principles in their ful- 
ness, and use freely any weapons of argument or ridicule, or 
whatever else can enforce his meaning, since men must be pro- 
vided for as well as children. And whoever aftects a manly 
religiousness will be none the worse, but greatly the better, for 
the study of Barns, provided he understands the province of 
art. That proviso, however, is essential. For there are many 
natures, with a good deal of manliness in them, that are woven 
of so coarse a fibre on the aBsthetic side of them that they are 
incapable of apprehending the prerogatives and utilities of art. 
The business of art is to represent both the real and the ideal; 
both nature as it is and nature as it might be conceived to be. 
But it passes no judgment upon the moral rectitude or other- 
wise of what it paints; that belongs to another department. 
A few years ago an excellent nobleman used to importune the 
House of Lords to provide skirts and trousers for the naked 
statues in the National Gallery. That good man had no con- 
ception of the function of art. He thought that sculpture was 
preaching indecency, while it was only representing nature. 
These are the sort of people who cry " (J, fy !" at many of the 
stronger things in Burns. They think he is exhorting, where 
he is only painting. " Holy Willie's Prayer" may be shock- 
ing; but why? because Holy Willie himself is shocking. If 
the mirror gives an ugly reflection of an ugly face, it issimplj^ 
to the credit of the mirror, whatever it may be to the face. 
This same idea of art, if they could only understand it, would 
put many foolish people right upon the subject of Burns' ama- 
tory and bacchanalian efiusious. The poet really does not re- 
commend unchastity and drunkenness; not even free love or 
free drinking. But the human spirit wants and needs an oc- 
casional escape from the restraints of conventional rules. Con- 
ventional law is, much of it, a necessary evil. We submit to 
it because we see that it is for the common good. But it is not 



16 

always the idea of life which we would sketch for ourselves, 
and it is the function of poetic art to furnish a dreamland to 
which we may occasionally betake ourselves when weary with 
the jog-trot of every- day life, and enjoy in fancy what we deny 
ourselves in fact. Such ideal Bohemianisms are very harm- 
less; they tell neither upon purse, nor health, nor morals. 
Nay, even those coarser productions which Burns himself 
never published (he kept back, out of regard for the sensitive, 
even such pure and powerful works of art as the " Jolly Beg- 
gars" aud "Holy Willie's Prayer,") but which, without his 
consent, and contrary to his desire, were given to the world by 
the relic-hunters, who rifled the dead man's pockets and ran- 
sacked his writing-desks, wiio interviewed the Paul Prys that 
peeped through his key-hole, and the Dogberrys that watched 
his door of nights to see if he kept elders' hours— even these 
are not fairly judged without reference to the idea of art.. A 
great artist with a passion for his art may be tempted to make 
figures of beauty out of dirt, if there be no better material near, 
even though he should soil his fingers in the making; but in 
criticising'^him, it should always be a question whether it is the 
dirt that he delights in or his own deftness in handling it. 
This I will say, that, taking Burns' writings all in all, and most 
certainly taking the writings whose publication he himself 
sanctioned, there breathes through them a purity of spirit and 
a healthiness of tone that are in edifying contrast to the insin- 
uating sensualisms of many of our modern poets and novelists 
whose praise is in all the booksellers. 

I have dwelt so long upon the point on which I thought I / 
might speak to most purpose that I can say but a sentence on \ 
the subordinate aspects of Burns' moral influence, and must ^ 
pass over altogether the consideration of his works as a contri- 
bution to the emotional happiness and the intellectual wealth 
of nations. What noble or manly virtue fails to find recogni- 
tion and support in his pages? Is it the first virtue of all, inde- 
pendence, resolution to rely on one's self, or suffer? — "Though 
much indebted to your goodness, I do not approach you, my 
lords and gentlemen, in the usual style of dedication, to thank 
you for past favors; that path is so hackneyed by prostituted 
learning that honest rusticity is ashamed of it. Nor do I pre- 
sent this address with the venal soul of a servile author, look- 
ing for the continuation of those favors: I was bred to the 
plough, and am independent." Happy the people whose spir- 
its are nurtured on sentiments like these, and who nerve them- 
selves for the struggle of life by recollecting that ' 'A man's a man 
for a' that." Is it an unworldly preference of mind to money? 

" O Thou who gies us each guid gift, 
Gie me o' wit and sense a lift. 
Then turn me, if Thou please, adrift 

Through Scotland wide ; 
Wi' cits nor lairds I wadna shift, 

In a' their pride." 



17 

Is it sympathy with every thiDg that feels? Where can it be 
better learnt than from intercourse with that catholic affection 
which touched at the one pole the simple piet}" of the " Cot- 
tar's Saturday Night," and at the other the uproarious freedom 
of the "Jolly Beggars;" which gave us the mingled humor and 
pathos of "Mailie's Elegy;" which saddened at the terror of 
the wildfowl of Lock Turit, and linked the despair of the des- 
olate field-mouse with its own? Is it the beauty of domestic 
affection and duty? \Yho teaches so often and so well that — 

" To make a happy fireside clime, 
To weans and wife, 
That's the true pathos and sublime 
Of human life." 

Is it the whole circle of the patriotic sentiments? Turn to 
"Scots wha hae," and end where you please and when you 
can. Is it faithfulness to the tender memories of bygone years ? 
Go to the exquisite plaintiveness of "Highland Mary," or to 
the broken-hearted trance of "Mary in Heaven." Is it the 
crowning grace of self-command ? Hear it chronicled in the 
writer's own heart's blood : 

" The poor inhabitant below, 
Was quick to learn and wise to know, 
And keenly felt the friendly glow 

And softer flame ; 
But thoughtless follies laid him low, 

And stained his name. 

"Reader, attend, whether thy soul 
Soars fancy's flights beyond the pole, 
Or darkling grubs this earthly hole 

In low pursuit — 
Know, prudent cautious self-control 

Is wisdom's root." 

With the life of Burns we are not specially concerned here. 
It is not so much the ploughboy of Doonside, the flax-spinner 
of Irvine, the farmer of Ellisland, or the ganger of Dumfries, 
as the poet of Scotland and of humanity whom we commem- 
orate, and for whom we make ourselves responsible. But 
though it is the poet we honor and thank Heaven for, we are 
not ashamed of the man. Others may drive Burns from their 
bosom; I dare not. He had the temptations that beset brilliant 
genius — temptations from which his detractors are mostly free. 
He had the temptations of a position in life most tryingly in 
contrast with his lofty gifts. His career has been explored by 
literary detectives and gossipmongers with a diligence that 
would have unearthed unedifying revelations in the history of 
the greatest saint in the calendar, and which is virtually equiv- 
alent to the extraction of secrets by the thumbscrews and the 
rack. Yet through it all I recognize a nature noble, manly, 
tender, striving towards the ideal good. No stain of meanness 



IS 

or dishonor rests upon his name. He owed no man anything. 
The greatest man of his country, and aware that he was so, he 
dug drains and gauged barrels, and did not grumble. He 
fought in secret with passions stronger than any of us can 
know, and bewailed his evil in agonies of penitence which we 
would need his capacity of feeling to understand; and he died 
at thirty-seven, before the battle of the spirit was done. Let 
the faultless put him from them. Perhaps it is right; but they 
must put me from them too. A sinful, struggling man myself, 
I cannot abandon my great and gifted and sorrowing brother 
in his grief. " Restore such an one in the spirit of meekness, 
considering thyself lest thou also be tempted," is a sacred law 
which I dare not and wish not to disobey. Grateful to Heaven 
for his work, proud of his name, mingling our sympathy with 
the recollection of his sorrows, we recall to mind to-night the 
asserter of truth, the smiter of dishonesty, the teacher of wis- 
dom, the psalmist of human brotherhood, the preacher of every 
manly virtue, the revealer of human character, the master at 
once of pathos and of wit, the sweet singer of the tender feel- 
ings, the poet of our country, yet the possession of mankind, 
Robert Burns. 



WASHINGTON— FESTIVAL OF 1874. 

Mr. W. R. Smith introduced the subject-matter of 
the festival in a few remarks. He said : 

Ladies and Gentlemen : It is my agreeable duty, as presi- 
dent of the Burns Club of Washington, to bid you a hearty 
welcome. We thank you, one and all, for uniting with us to 
honor the name, and, if it be possible, to increase the fame of 
him — 

" Who sang of Scotia's loves and joys 
As poets ne'er had sung. 
And woke a strain which echoes down 
The ages ever more. 
American forest and Australian plain 
Swell the impassioned notes from shore to shore. 
Immortal Burns ! deep in the inmost core 
Of Scotia's heart, thy image lies enshrined ; 
'Midst tears and smiles, beloved more and more, 
The poet and the priest of human kind. 
What needs thy name the aid of puny art ? 
It lives eternal in the human heart. 

What wealth of glory Scotia owes to thee. 
Immortal Burns ! 
Her noblest one ! 

In the far west thy star hesperian glows ; 
In the far east it shines another sun. 
Bend low, my boys, before this simple shrine ! 
Bend low to Burns, to poesy divine !" 

These lines, fresh from Auld Scotland, I found as a contri- 
bution from Dunbar to the poet's corner of a rural paper, pub- 



lished in Haddington. They indicate clearly the true posi- 
tion of the poet, and may be taken as proof of the truth of 
Thomas Carlyle's prophecy that time would but increase the 
fame of Burns. His article in the Edinburgh Rem'eio, 1828, 
containing this prophecy, together with John Wilson's great 
essay on the genius of the poet, did much to teach the people 
to think aright about Burns. 

Another glorious exposition of the poet, and a truly christian 
examination of the character of the man, was made by the 
Rev. Dr. Wallace, just two years ago, in a speech at the birth- 
day celebration in Edinburgh. This gentleman's intellectual 
strength seems worthy of his famous name. 

His speech, together with Carlyle's letter about Burns Clubs 
generally being aimless things, with a very little of Burns and 
a great deal of self in them, induced us, as a club, to examine- 
ourselves, and to make an effort to elevate and give a higher 
aim to our association. The Burns Club as now established is 
for the purpose of gathering together the various editions of 
Burns' works — biographies, illustrations, eulogies, portraits, 
in short, everything that can in any way illustrate the laud, the 
literature, and character of Burns — to have regular meetings 
whereat his poems may be read, his songs sung, addresses 
delivered, criticisms read, and to make an earnest effort to 
honor his memory by a celebration of his birthday; thus ta 
keep in remembrance our undying admiration of the noble 
qualities which distinguished him while living. 

Ladies and gentlemen, with your kind co-operation we can 
make the Burns Club of Washington worthy of the man and 
the place; worthy of the author of that grand Declaration of 
Independence — 

"A man's a man for a' that." 

Worthy of the home of that political idea — 

"The rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
The man's the gowd for a' that." 

Ladies and gentlemen, words cannot utter the gladness of 
my own heart, and I speak also for those congenial co-operat- 
ing spirits who have worked and struggled together to secure 
this magnificent meeting in honor of our darling poet. 

We are proud to have with us those whom the nation de- 
lighteth to honor with her highest positions, to speak for the 
immortal author of — 

" Scots wha ha'e wi' Wallace bled." 

Again let me thank you in the name of the Club for your 
presence. 

The president then read the following note from the 
Speaker of the House of Bepresentatives, the Hon. 
James Gr. Blaine : 



20 

Fifteenth Street, ^'dth January, 1874, 
Thursday Evening. 
To thi President of the Burns (JhCb : 

A hoarseness which has been coming on me through the day de- 
prives me of the pleasure I had anticipated of proposing a toast to 
the memory of Burns, and adding a word of introduction to my 
friend, Gen. Garfield. My tasli, however, wowld be superfluous^ 
even if I could be present, for the General needs neither introduc- 
tion nor commendation to the Burns Club. He will speak to you 
in a manner that will make you thank me for considerately staying 
away and not delaying his eloquent words. 

The Scotch are always proud of their birth and their blood; and 
this pride, I venture to testify, will bear transplanting, and can be 
inherited in its full strength at least down to the fifth generation. 
Wherever you find one who traces even a remote relationship to 
" Auld Scotia," you will find a hearty admirer of Burns. But ge- 
nius is not confined to lands or latitudes. It belongs to the whole 
world; and to-night on three continents and the far-off isles of the 
Southern Sea the memory of the great poet will be celebrated with 
admiration, enthusiasm, and affection. 

In haste, sincerely yours, 

J. G. BLAINE. 

Gen. James A. G-arfield, on coming forward to 
respond to the toast "The day we celebrate," was 
greeteel with warm applause. He said : 

I have no doubt that the kind reference to me by the Honor- 
able Speaker, in the letter which has just been read, springs 
from his remembrance of the fact that a few years ago he and 
I enjoyed the great pleasure of visiting the land of Burns, and 
making the tour of the Scottish lakes in company. And w^ho 
that has once seen it can forget such a laud, or wonder that its 
rugged and noble beauties should have added inspiration to 
the genius of its poets? Who can forget the excursion along 
the banks of the Doon, where every turn of the road and river 
has been immortalized by the ride of "glorious" Tam? 

I take this occasion, Mr. Chairman, to thank you and the 
Burns Club of Washington for the pleasant opportunity which 
you liave afforded me to turn aside for a moment from the 
exacting duties of public life and from its sharp conflicts, to 
enjoy this festival, and to unite in doing honor to the memory 
and genius of the foremost song-writer of the world. 

It is usual to praise Burns chiefly because of the great con- 
trast between the splendor of his work and the humbleness of 
his origin. But genius needs no apologies on that score; and 
I do not hesitate to challenge the comparison between his 
works and those of any other poets who have w^rought in the 
same field. 

In the highest class of lyric poetry three names stand emi- 
nent. Their field covers eighteen centuries of time, and the 
three men are Horace, Beranger, and Burns. It is an interest- 



21 

ing and suggestive fact that each of these sprang from the 
humble walks of life. Each may be described as one 

" Wiio begs a brother of the earth 
To give him leave to toil," 

and each proved, by his life and achievements, that, however 
hard the lot of poverty, " a man's a man for a' that." 

Permit me to glance a moment at the characteristics of each. 
Horace, the son of a freedman, was born among the wild 
scenes and simple virtues of the Sabine country. His oppor- 
tunities for education were greater than either of the other 
two with whom I am comparing him. But he began his 
career as a treasury clerk, liviiig on a pittance that scantily 
furnished him with "bread and lentils;" and yet, in that 
humble position, he laid the foundation of a fame whose glory 
shines down across the ages with lustre ever brightening as 
the centuries advance. 

The Roman language was the severe language of law, of 
war, of stately oratory; but it was songiess, until Horace came 
and attuned its measures to the melody of the lyre. He had 
a right to boast that he was "the first who wed Italian meas- 
ures to JSolian song." It may have been thought boastful in 
hiin, when, in the last ode of the third book, he ventured to 
predict that his verses would be remembered as long as the 
high priest of Apollo and the silent vestal virgin should climb 
the steps of the Capitol. But his prophecy has been more 
than fulfilled. Fifteen centuries ago the sacred fires of Vesta 
went out, never to be rekindled. For a thousand years Apollo 
has had no shrine, uo priest, no worshipper on the earth. The 
steps of the Capitol, and the temples that crowned it, live only 
in dreams. But the songs of Horace are read and admired in 
all nations, wherever learning and culture are cherished. His 
pages glow to-day with all the brightness and beauf^y that de- 
lighted the social life of Italy eighteen hundred years ago. 

Beranger, the second in the group, was a child of poverty, 
born in an obscure corner of France. Catching the spirit of 
liberty inspired by the French revolution, he crowned the rude 
dialect of Normandy with the glory of immortal song. He 
not only ennobled his native tongue, but fired the heart of 
France with an enthusiasm and fervor which only a born poet 
can create. 

Who will deny that Burns is not only worthy to stand in this 
group, but that in many respects his glorj^ outshines that of 
the Roman and the Norman ? Born in a country whose nat- 
ural beauty is in strange contrast with the sterility of its soil, 
his early life was passed in the extremest poverty. Doomed 
to the hard slavery of mechanical toil; receiving not more 
than seven pounds sterling for the labor of a whole year, yet, 
out of this narrow and oppressive life, which ended at the 
early age of thirty-eight, he poured forth melodies so sweet 



22 

and so perfect that they echo and re-echo to-day in all lan- 
guages and in all hearts as the voice of Great Nature singing 
to her children. If Horace attuned the stately language of 
Rome to the lyre, Burns lifted up into immortal song, and 
saved from perishing, the dialect of his native land. If Horace 
" raised his mortals to the skies," we may say, with truth, that 
Burns " drew the angels down," 

Taine, the great French critic, admits that Burns is greater 
than Beranger ; and time alone can test the relative greatness 
of Burns and Horace. Burns was indeed the prophetic voice 
of the new age— the age born of the French revolution. Rising 
above the trammels of birth and poverty, he spoke for the 
great voiceless class of laboring men throughout the world, 
while kings and countries listened in wonder and amazement. 

A great writer has said that it took the age forty years to 
catch Burns, so far was he in advance of the thoughts of his 
time. But we ought not to be surprised at the power he ex- 
hibited. We are apt to be misled when we seek to find the 
cause of greatness in the schools and universities alone. There 
is no necessary conflict between nature and art. In the highest 
and best sense, art is as natural as nature. We do not wonder 
at the perfect beauty of the rose, although we may not under- 
stand the mysteries by which its delicate petals are fashioned 
and fed out of the grosser elements of the earth. We do not 
wonder at the perfection of the rose, because God is the artist. 
When He fashioned the germ of the rose tree, He made possi- 
ble the beauties of its flower. The earth and air and sunshine 
conspired to unfold and adorn it ; to tint and crown it with 
peerless beauty. When the Divine Artist would produce a 
poem. He plants the germ of it in a human soul, and out of 
that soul the poem springs and grows as from the rose tree the 
rose. 

Burns was a child of nature. He lived close to her beating 
heart ; and all the rich and deep sympathies of life grew and 
blossomed in his own. The beauties of earth, air, and sky 
filled and transfigured him: 

" He did but sing because he must, 
And piped but as the linnets sing. " 

With the light of his genius he glorified "the banks and 
braes" of his own land ; and, speaking for the universal hu- 
man heart, has set its sweetest thoughts to music — 

" Whose echoes roll from soul to soul, 
And grow for ever and forever. " 



23 

WASHINGTON— FESTIVAL OF 1875. 

Mr. W. II, S:riTn opened the proceedings of the 
evening as follows : 

Ladies AND Gentlemen : As President of the Burns Club 
I bid you welcome, and thank you for uniting with us to do 
honor to one of tlie most gifted beings that ever adorned and 
delighted our race. One hundred and sixteen years ago 
Robert Burns was born. 

" Upon a stormy, winter night, 
Scotland's bright star first rose in sight, 
Beaming upon as wild a sky 
As ever to prophetic eye 
Proclaimed, that nature had on hand 
Some work to glorify the laad — 
Within a lonely cot of clay 
That night her great creation lay. 

" Coila — the nymph that rouud his brow 
Twined the red-berried holly bough — 
Her swift-winged heralds sent abroad, 
To summon to that bleak abode, 
All who on genius still attend 
For good or evil to the end. 
They came obedient to her call — 
The immortal infant knew them all. 

'* Sorrow and poverty— sad pair- 
Came shivering through the wintry air: 
Hope and pity and love were there. 

** Wit with a harum-scarum grace. 
Who smiled at Laughter's dimpled face. 
Labor, who came with sturdy tread, 
By high-souled Independence led. 
Care who sat noiseless on the floor, 
While Wealth stood up outside the door. 
******** 

** Then Coila raised her hollied brow 
And said, 'Who will this child endow?' 
Said Love, ' I'll teach him all my lore, 
As it was never taui^jht before;' " 
Said Pity, ' It shall be my part 
To gift iiim with a gentle heart.' 
Said Independence, stout and strong, 
' I'll make it to wage war with wrong.' 
Said Wit, ' He shall have mirch and laughter, 
Though all the ills of life come after.' 

" Warbling her native wood-notes wild, 
Fancy but stooped and kissed the child. 
While through her locks of golden hair 
Hope looked down with a smile on Care. 



24 

" Said Labor, ' I will give him bread;' 
' And I a stone when lie is dead,' 
Said Wealth, while Shame hung down her head. 

" ' He'll need no monument,' said Fame; 
' I'll give him an immortal name; 
When obelisks in ruin fall, 
Proud shall it stand above them all; 
The daisy on the mountain side 
Shall ever spread it far and wide; 
Even the roadside thistle-down - 
Shall blow abroad his high renown.' 

" Said Time, ' That name while I remain 
Shall still increasing honor gain, 
'Till the sun sinks to rise no more, 
And my last sand falls on the shore 
Of that still, dark, and unsailed sea, 
Which opens on Eternity.' " 

These words by Thomas Miller but speak in prophetic rhap- 
sody of what will be the fate of the name we are met to honor 
to-night. The ovation to Burns on his centennial birthday was 
the greatest honor ever paid to a poet. When in 1844 his 
son returned from India 70,000 persons honored him for his 
father's sake by a festival on the banks of " bonnie Doon." 
Christopher North then said, "Burns is among the highest 
order of human beings v/ho have benefited their race by the 
expression of noble sentiments and glorious thoughts." This 
estimate is not overdrawn. " Has he not elevated honest rus- 
ticity, lightened the burden of care, aided to reconcile poverty 
to its lot, advanced the dignity of labor, placed a crown on the 
head of an honest man ' though e'er so poor,' and proclaimed 
him ' King o' men for a' that?' " 

The president then read the following letter from the 
Hon. Wm. p. Frye : 

Washington, January 16, 1875. 
W. R. Smith, Esq., 

President of the Burn'^ Club : 

My Dear Sir : I accepted, with pleasure and with pride, your 
kind invitation to address the Burns Club at their annual meeting, 
but unexpectedly find that I cannot fulfil the engagement, it hav- 
ing been determined by the committee, of which I am a member, 
to go to Louisiana at once. To simply say that I regret this is a 
cold expression of my feelings, for I should delight to speak, from 
a full heart, of Scotland, of Wallace, of Bruce, and of Burns, who 
has made for them all a glorious immortality. 

And yet our mission south, it seems to me, would have been re- 
garded' by your great poet a sacred duty. Since that sweetest 
songster that ever sang warbled the magical words, "a man's a 
man for a' that," a great struggle has been waged throughout the 
world, sometimes silentlv, sometimes terribly, to prove the fidelity 
of Barns to trijth in that utterance. Our own country has been 
the theatre of one of the fiercest conflicts, the issue of which is not 
even yet made certain. May the end show— 



25 

" The honest, man, though e'er sae poor, 
Is kinsj; o' men for a' that." 
May Heaven bless old Scotland, her raonntnins and valleys, her 
Doon and her Clyde, her Yarrow and her Tweed. "Lonj.r ruay her 
hardy sons of rustic toil be blessed with health and peace and sweet 
content." We bless thy memory, too, Robert Burns, who so loved 
old Scotia, her men and women, even her mice and daisies, "her 
silly sheep" and "courie cattle," aye, who loved all thinjrs botn 
great and small, and couldn't hate even " auld Nickie-ben." 

Respectfully, WM. P. FRYE. 

The Hon. JA.:\rES Monroe, of Ohio, was then intro- 
duced, and made a felicitous and scholarly address, in 
which he compared the various British poets, placing 
Burns as next to Shakespeare in his power of touching 
the universal heart. There were no Milton clubs, no 
Byron clubs, not even a Tennyson club ; while Burns 
clubs existed all over the world, wherever the English 
language was spoken, and they would continue to exist 
for all time. 

The president of the Club, in introducing Hon. S. S. 
Cox, said : 

Ladies and Gentlemen: I have now the pleasure to intro- 
duce to you the American biographer of his " Satanic Majesty in 
Literature;'''' as a '■''Buckeye Abroad " in search of " Winter Sun- 
beams^^ he no doubt made some further acquaintance with his 
majesty, and can perhaps enlighten us on the doings of Auld 
Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie. Our poet treated Satan kindly 
and was " wae to think upon yon place, e'en for his sake;" so 
does his American biographer. 

Hon. S. S. Cox was received with hearty applause, 
and spoke as follows : 

Your president introduces me somewhat vaguely as one of 
the biographers of Satan. I had supposed my humble article 
was long since forgotten. It is said in Scripture that the devil 
and all his works shall perish. I wonder that all the works 07i 
the devil himself have not perished. But really, he is not so 
black after all. He has many winning ways. He is as much 
entitled to a biographer as a witch to a cat. I can see that my 
friend, the president, takes a family and national pride in him. 
"When the article referred to was printed it was for the Knick- 
erbocker Magazine, and intended to glorify '• Old Nick" in liter- 
ature. How I omitted Burns' "Auld Hornie" or " Clootie" I 
can scarcely tell. I was quite young then ; had not mixed 
much in society or politics; had not come to Congress; and, 
therefore, ray knowledge of deviltry was limited. The longer 
I live the more I see of it — and perhaps the more we live the 
more we tolerate the evil genius. 



26 

Indeed, the Scotch devil, as organized by the genius of 
Burns, is a eulogy to his better qualities. It seems at first 
blush to be suggested by Milton's apostrophe to the Prince, 
who led the embattled Seraphim against Heaven; but his is a 
better Satan than the warrior of Milton. He takes no delight 
in the squealing sinner. Old " Clootie" has a nice send-off for 
his noted name. Burns makes him rage, to be sure, like a roar- 
ing lion "tirlingthe kirks." He reproduces the wildness of 
the "lonely glen" and ruined castle amidst the windy winter 
nights. He calls on the warlocks and hags of the kirk-yards, 
the water kelpies of the ford, and the spunkies of the moss as 
his associates, until he brings his Satan nunc pro tunc into 
Paradise ^>ico^. to give the infant world a "shog," and then 
makes him play practical jokes on Job, until he fairly boiled 
to pardon him by the benevolent universalism of the last 
verse — 

"I'm wae to think upon yon den — 
E'en for your sake," 

which, out of the patois, means — I don't want a hell, even to 
put the devil in. 

But this remarkable good-natured devil of Burns has some 
peculiarties of character and conduct which remind one of 
the comic devil of the sacred drama of the Middle Ages. He 
is not the devil represented in ancient or modern times. He 
is more Robert Burns than Robert Le Diable. He has as little 
of the Assyrian devil as of the Prometheus of ^schylus. But 
is he not comprehended in the universal genius of Goethe V" 
Mephistopheles takes any shape. He is the standing Diabolos 
of the Greek, the adversary of Job, the serpent of Eden, the 
dragon of the Revelation, and always jolly. I am not sure but 
that the infinite variety of the article which Washington and 
its lobbies furnish was anticipated by Goethe, if not by Burns. 
Where did not Mephistopheles lurk? Where do we not find 
that spirit of evil? Not the old theological animal, with horn 
and hoof, such as the excommunicated from Kirk were pos- 
sessed of, and such as old wives tell of; but the sly devil,, 
which dances in the eye of beauty, gambols in the polka and 
german, and on the faro table; puts on the claw-hammer of 
the courtier and the frock of the preacher; pores over the mis- 
sals of the scholar and the " ayes and noes " of Congress. He 
is to be found in the imperial palace or the poorest hovel. You 
may see this universal spirit in the bourses of speculation, and 
he conceals under the big ulster overcoat the forked tail and 
lightnings of his unscrupulous intellect! The Burns^ devil is, 
however, something kinder and more human than this univer- 
sal genius. In one poem Burns makes him an exciseman, and 
thovigh not strictly defined, it may be said of him, as some one 
said of Raphael's devil in the Sistine Chapel, " If he is not the 
devil, it is some d — d thing or other." He would not have the 
devil here for a time, although he would not object to a " devil 
of a time. " 



27 

The truth is, we each carry our devil around with us as a 
part of our personality. Why should not Burns^ idea of in- 
carnate evil be as jolly as himself, who was an exciseman? 
And what pleasure could the exciseman take in the unnatural 
destruction or unjust distribution of Scotch whiskey? I can 
well imagine how, in the regions of northern Scotland, where 
an Englishman (Shakespeare) located a "blasted heath," you 
know, and peopled its air with beings of metaphysical entity, 
that a grand and terrific ideal of the spirit of evil should arise, 
like Hecate or the witches of Macbeth, from the dreary mists 
of the Highlands. But Burns' devil, while he once rode on 
the blasts with Tarn O'Shanter, had a more social way — as a 
government official. He was not a conservator of fruits and 
flowers, like you, Mr. President. He was a simple government 
detective. He seized spirits, it is true, as Satan does, and he 
confiscated them to the best purposes. He would have been 
an invaluable aid under any administration. I think he may 
now and then be detected in our " secret service." 

But, ladies and gentlemen, the genius of Burns was not lim- 
ited to creations of evil. It would have been more grateful to 
me this evening to have discussed the genial and etherial quali- 
ties of his song. How he sympathized with nature ; its beau- 
ties, its attractions, its humility, and its heart. How sweetly 
flowed the current of his rhyme, as he gave new purple to the 
heather and new blush to the rose ! How the hours winged 
their angel flight in the loved homes which he peopled with his 
genius ! 

^Vith all the splendid galaxy of Scotch intellect, and wherever 
the Scotch mind goes — as far as a thistle can fly. and as fre- 
quently as it can produce — no such name as that of Robert 
Burns has gone so far or been heralded so prodigally and 
warmly. If Watts in invention, Adam Smith in economy. 
Brougham in eloquence, Knox in theology, Hume in history, 
Sydney Smith in wit, Jeff'rey in criticism, and Scott in fiction 
were all combined in one effulgent star, it would not equal the 
splendors of Burns ! When Burns wrote the couplet — 

" Rank is but the guinea's stamp, 
A man's the gowd for a' that " — 

he made his name foremost among those who have championed 
the natural nobilities of mankind. It expresses the "legal 
tender" of the Creator ! Fresh out of the natural " pockets," 
where the richest nuggets nestle, he drew the ingot which no 
alloy of human error ever tarnished or can ever destroy. A 
man's the gold for all that may happen to him in the accidents, 
fortunes, deprivations, and vicissitudes of time. As such he 
will be tested in the furnace of affliction, and in the great assay 
when the genuine shall be separated from the counterfeit. 

I have referred to the intellect of Scotland, whose honors are 
recorded by Buckle. Where has not that intellect gone ? Is it 
limited to any hemisphere or sphere? Is not Livingstone him- 



28 

self a Scotchmau ? He went into the very heart of Africa. 
When Burns sings that a man's a man, I know just what he 
means. Why, sir, there is a splendid Presbyterian barber in 
this city — as black as black can be. His name is Campbell. 
He comes of the clan. He is surely a Scotchman. I know it, 
if not by his slogan, then by his brogan. But if the Scotch 
Livingstone could find the interior of Africa, why may not 
Campbell ? My distinguished friend from North Carolina, (Mr. 
Waddell,) who honors his State as well by his studies as by his 
political eminence, who is now present and blushing while I 
speak, made an interesting brochure to prove that the Welsh and 
Irish were in North Carolina in the i2th century. A fortiori^ why 
should not the Campbells be found in Africa ? 

In conclusion, therefore, I rise from the spirit of deviltry 
enshrined in the poetry of our bard to those other and more 
elevated creations v/hich have added a lustre to Caledonia, and 
made a new history for the lyric muse ! May your enjoyment 
of this anniversary be unalloyed by the presence of any other 
than that of the blithe and bonnie spirit which makes that 
muse as mirthful as it is immortal ! 

THE FESTIVAL OF 1876. 
Mr. GrEORGE CoAViE, president, delivered a short but 
appropriate address, welcoming in a most cordial man- 
ner the guests of the Club, to the number of over six 
hundred, and then introduced Hon. Wm. P. Fkye, of 
Maine, who spoke as follows : 

Mr. President: I saw in the press a few days since that I 
was to deliver an address before this Club; that it would un- 
doubtedly sparkle with wit and abound in eloquence. What 
a sarcasm! If I dreamed that you were expecting anything of 
this kind I should at once follow the example of the fellow 
who, having forced head and shoulders through his neighbor's 
paling, being discovered and accosted with, " You infamous 
scoundrel, where are you going?" replied, " Out," and went. 
I have no fountain on which I can draw at sight for eloquence 
and wit. I have a heart beating always in sympathy with Scot- 
land, and a love going out abundantly to Scotchmen and 
Scotchwomen. How could it be otherwise? In the House I 
am flanked by my friends McDill and McDougal, while in my 
rear sit Wilson and Phillips, and right before me is the smil- 
ing, honest face of my old friend, the Cerberus of the Flower 
Garden, Smith. Besides, my wife, who came to me through 
the McDougals and Gregorys, is so much of a Scotchwoman 
that she rules her household with love and a rod — the rod being 
in the majority. So true is she to her ancestry, if she had been 
standing beside the stern old Scotchwoman who listened to 
the piteous appeals of Hume, the infidel, for help, as he was 
sinking in the quagmire, and made him repeat the Lord's 



29 

Prayer and the Ten Comniaudments as condition precedent to 
his salvation, I think she would have cried "Amen and amen!" 
These reasons for sympathy surely ought to inspire me to say 
a few kind and honest words to you on this anniversary occa- 
sion. Wherever I go, whatever circumstances surround me, 
I am loyal to the North. I am as true to it as was ''John 
Hatteras " to the Pole. Even if I should go mad, as did he, 
still my steps, with his, would ever turn thitherward. I love 
its mountains and its valleys, its rivers and its lakes, its ice 
and its snow, its barrenness and its ruggeduess. I love its 
men who earn their bread by the sweat of the brow; who never 
saw that land which, "tickled with a hoe, would laugh with 
a harvest;" who plough, harrow, dig with spade and mattock, 
and then are supremely content if only it smiles with an av- 
erage crop. They are hardy^, honest, God-fearing, and coun- 
try-loving. The distinguished gentleman who is to deliver 
the address, to which this is only a feeble introduction, will 
forgive me, I know, if I seem somewhat exuberant over my 
own, even if he thinks my imagination is somewhat too warm 
over "the eternal solitudes of snow which mantle the ice- 
bound North." He can well afford to, f«r the man who made 
for the ignoble Duluth such a glorious immortality in an hour's 
time, is abundantly able to take care of the blue-grass regions 
of the fertile Kentucky or "the fragrant savannas of the sun- 
lit South." 

In early boyhood, romance and poetry had made sacred to 
me Old Scotia's shores; had clothed with a glorious immor- 
tality her Ben Lomond, Ben More, and Ben Ness; her Clyde 
and her Tay, her Tweed and her Dee — crystalized them all 
into monuments of liberty, loyalty, and patriotism. And 
when later in life the pages of history opened to me, I learned 
that neither novelist nor poet had told half of the wonderful 
story. Caledonia, way back in the ages of darkness, peopled 
by fierce, savage, and idolatrous tribes, but brave and liberty- 
loving, almost alone of the nations, fought successfully the 
Roman empire; so brave and so fierce were they, that this 
mistress of the world thought it discreet to w^all them in. 

Scotland, for more than a thousand years, for liberty and 
the right to worship God according to the dictates of con- 
science, fought the whole power of England, until the blood 
of her brave sons washed every mountain side, drenched every^ 
valley, tinged every lake and river. Now you know" well that 
the cause a nation espouses and fights for has a reflex action 
upon her people. Spain fought for conquest and slavery, and 
to-day is a bankrupt beggar among the nations, impotent to 
hold in subjection one little Island of the Sea. 

Rome fought for glory and empire, and she is only known 
in history. Our Republic fought for liberty, equal rights, and 
humanity, and this year the world will join in her Centennial. 
Scotland came out from her fiery furnace of war purified. 
Those savage, idolatrous tribes of Caledonians gradually grew 



30 

into the brave, iutelligent, God-fearing soldiers, who just be- 
fore entering the battle at Bannockburn, to a man knelt, and 
with uplifted hearts and hands asked help from the God of 
Battles, King Edward, seeing them, cried, "The cravens al- 
ready ask mercy;" to whom an English baron replied: " Sir, 
they ask no mercy of us; they pray for help from God. They 
will conquer or die." And they conquered ! Her chieftains, 
fierce and cruel, became the William Wallace, as brave as 
Henry, and as chivalrous as Bayard; the Robert Bruce, who 
could defend the pass against an army unaided, who could 
slay a score of armed men with his own hands, and yet be as 
gentle and tender as a woman; who, when his army was re- 
treating before an overwhelming force of English and Irish, 
hearing one day an outcry, and on inquiry, learning that it 
was a poor camp-follower giving birth to a child, and in a 
terrible agony of fear lest she might fall into the hands of the 
" Child eatiu.g Barbarians,^'' called a council of his officers, 
said to them, "Shame on the man born of woman, nursed 
by her tenderness, who will desert a mother in the hour of 
her travail and pain," ordered a halt of his army, and held 
them there until the woman recovered, then marched to the 
mountain in safety. That single act of gentleness consecrated 
his name beyond all the glories of the bfittle-field. The orator 
relates of Sir Philip Sidney, that mortally wounded, borne 
from the battle-field, thirsty and dying, a cup of cold water 
was passed to him; he seeing a soldier by the roadside, gave it 
to him, saying, "Brother, thy necessities are greater than 
mine." That single act of self-forgetful sacrifice consecrated 
the name of Sidney more than all the battles fought or victories 
won. These are the highest type of the soldier, the christian 
soldier, the warrior of courage and gentleness. Slowly, but 
surely, Scotland climbed to the highest type of civilization, 
that born of education and religion, of the school and the 
Bible, of the altar of the Cotter's Saturday Night in every 
house. Look upon her in the 18th century. In the 17th it 
was enacted that a school-house should be erected in every 
parish, and a schoolmaster appointed. Earlj^ in the 18th her 
people were more generally educated than any other in Europe. 
The world knew and admired her historians, her poets, her 
philosophers, her scientists, and the nations paid tribute to her 
universities at Edinburgh, Glasgow, St. Andrew's, and Aber- 
deen. The Edinburgh Review and Blackioood's Edinburgh Maga- 
zine are to-day unrivalled in the world, while Edinburgh is the 
only rival of London in the British Empire as a publishing 
centre. In the arts, sciences, agriculture, and manufactures she 
has no occasion to hide her face. Such a country — so cold, so 
barren, so mountainous, so torn and distracted by ruthless 
wars — only 300 miles long and 200 wide, with such glorious 
fruits of the highest civilization! Whence did it come? From 
the perpetual contest for liberty and equal rights and religion, 
the school-book, and the Bible. This civilization, indigenous 



31 

to the cold countries of the north, crossed the ocean, lauded on 
the bleak, barren coast of Massachusetts, toiled, suffered, and 
fought until, one hundred years ago, it declared, in words that 
shall live forever, making glad the hearts of toiling millions, 
"All men are created free and equal," and a clarion voice 
from Scotia's shore replied, " A man's a man for a' that," Un- 
der its inspiration, independence was achieved, and England 
lost from her diadem one of its brightest jewels. But barba- 
rism, too, had crossed the same ocean, landed on the friendly, 
fertile, and sunny shores of the South; it flourished, grew 
strong and stronger, until it flaunted its black flag in the very 
face of civilization, and threatened its own terrible supremacy. 
Then, again, this pure spirit of the North put on the armor, 
girded on the sword, and went forth to do battle. Trusting to 
the God of Battles, inspired with *' A man's a man for a' that," 
it conquered, and no more forever shall a slave tread the wine- 
press in our fair land. The war over, Christian civilization 
said, forgive, poured out the balm of Gilead without stint or 
measure, and this Centennial year wq have a country free, 
united, purified, and sanctified.' 

More than a century ago this glorious Old Scotland, inspired 
by such a civilization, labored and brought forth a child, laid 
him in a mud-covered hut, gave him to a mother who loved 
the "dear God," and to a father who feared Him. Then the 
boy, with no lingering step, with satchel and book, went to 
the humble school, while at home the master and the mistress 
taught, 

" An' O, be sure to fear the Lord alway. 

And mind your duty duly morn and night; 

Lest in temptations path ye Kang astray 
Implore His counsel an' assisting might. 

They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright." 

Thus instructed he grew apace, and next we find him a 
whistling plow-boy, turning the daisy beneath the share, and 
driving "the cruel coulter thro' poor mouser's cell." He 
studied, he worked, he prayed, he loved, he suflered — he sang, 
until one day he wrote his name, " Robert Burns, Poet." And 
one hundred years from the day this child was born, every city 
in the civilized world celebrated his anniversary. Historians, 
poets, philosophers, orators, and the great men of all lands 
paid him homage, while the lowly sang his praises. To no 
man was ever such homage paid before, and I think I may 
safely say that the name of "Robert Burns, Poet," has been 
and is dearer to more hearts than any other except alone that of 
Him who was born in a manger, toiled, suffered, and died that 
we might live. From whence came this wondrous power ? 
How did he win this priceless gift of universal love ? It was 
not bought with money. The price he paid was the mud-cov- 
ered hut, the sterile land, the poverty, the sorrow, the labor, 
the suffering life among the lowly. Scotland, her mountains, 



32 

iier glens, her lakes, her rivers, her battles, her heroes, her 
schools, and her altars were his inspiration. Nature, with her 
rod, touched his heart, and pure limpid streams of sympathy, 
of charity, of loyalty, of purity, of wisdom, of mirth, and of 
satire, sprang forth— heart speaking to heart. This is why all 
men have given him an immortality as tender, loving, and 
blessed as he gave to Mary in heaven. All men ; ah, no ! 
there are a few cold-blooded, puritanical — I beg pardon of the 
Puritans — Pharisees, who see in Burns the scoffer, the wine- 
bibber, the reveller, the keeper of low company. They stand 
upon a pedestal of ice and look down upon his warm, loving 
heart, and feel no responsive warmth in theirs. Even such 
must yield some respect to Burns, the exciseman. He per- 
formed his duties faithfully ; he was economical in his ex- 
penditures ; he stole no stamps, and though his salary was 
only fifty pounds a year he asked no back pay, demanded no 
increase, passed no crooked whiskey. To be sure, he was now 
and then late at his office, but, like Charles Lamb, went home 
early enough to make it up. Even Henderson, with all his 
eloquence, with all the facts in the case, forgetting his sworn 
duty as a prosecuting officer, and throwing into the scales 
against the prisoner all of the imaginary infamies of the most 
infamous administration of ancient or modern times, could 
not have forced from a jury of his peers a verdict of " guilty." 

" Then fill the sparkling goblet high, 

And let no discord stain it ; 
Let joy illume each manly eye. 

While to the dregs we drain it ! 
To Burns ! To Burns ! The King of Song ! 

Whose lyre shall charm all ages ! 
Mirth, Wisdom, Love, and Satire strong, 

Adorn his deathless pages. " 

Hon. J. Proctor Knott, of Kentucky, was next 
introduced, and addressed the assembly in the follow- 
ing happy vein : 

Mr. Chairman, when I received the very complimentary 
notice that I was expected to be present and address you this 
evening it occurred to me that the gentlemen who had it in 
charge to arrange the programme for the occasion had cer- 
tainly committed a most singular mistake. I could conceive 
«f no possible reason why they should consider me capable of 
contributing a single additional ray to the resplendent halo 
which will forever encircle the immortal name of Scotland's 
favorite bard. It is true I had always felt proud, and perhaps 
somewhat more pious and patriotic than most people, on ac- 
count of my direct descent from the sturdy old Covenanters 
who fought for the faith of their fathers at Drumclog and 
Bothweli's Brigg, and whose descendants signed the original 
declaration of independence at Mecklenberg. Yet I can 



33 

scarcely refrain from exclaiming, in the language of my 
saintly old friend, Holy Willie: 

•' What was I, or niy j^eneration, 
That I should get sic exaltation?" 

But since I have listened to the address of the distinguished 
gentleman whose eloquent periods still tingle through every 
iibre and tissue of our souls, and hold us as under the spell of 
some delicious enchantment, I am satisfied that you will agree 
with me in the opinion that they have been guilty of a still more 
egregious blunder— one, in fact, which ought to be sufficient 
to blast their reputation as literary caterers for all time to 
come — the miserable, unpardonable mistake at a festival like 
the present, of bringing on the bacon and cabbage after we 
have had the strawberries and ice cream. It is but charitable 
to suppose, and perhaps but justice to the gentlemen who in- 
vited me, to say that I am here to-night purely by mistake. 
For I cannot imagine that they could have had any secret 
malice against me which they wished to gratify by enticing 
me into one of the most difficult and trying positions I ever 
occupied in my life — the humiliating predicament of being 
compelled to realize, to its fullest extent, my own utter and 
abject poverty of thought and expression when measured by 
the theme upon which I am expected to speak. For what can 
I say of the genius of RobertBurns which has not been already 
said a thousand times, and that, too, with an elegance, a 
beauty, and a force of diction far beyond the reach of any 
power that I possess? What single thought can I suggest to 
any genuine lover of his species — especially to those whose 
halcyon days were spent on the "banks and braes, o' bonnie 
Doon," or by the classic w^aters of " the winding Ayr" — that 
could make the pulse beat faster or the eye grow brighter than 
the simple mention of the poet's name? Indeed, I have many 
and many a time remarked it as a most singular fact that you 
may take one by one the brightest stars in all the wondrous 
constellation of Scottish genius; you might recite, if you could, 
with an angel's tongue, the story of their sublime achieve- 
ments in arms and in art, in science, in literature, in histor}^ 
in politics, in poetry, in philosophy, or in theology, and you 
would fail to excite such a flame of national pride and enthusi- 
asm in any genuine Scotchman's bosom as will be kindled by 
simply mentioning the name of Burns. You may inscribe 
their names high as you will on the scroll of human fame, and 
he will write the name of his country's rustic poet high above 
them all; even above that of Sir Walter Scott, the mighty 
monarch of the human heart — 

*' Who on mind's hicrh steep could stand 
And marshal with his sceptered hand 
The whirlwind and the cloud, 
And write a name too briijht to die, 
In lii^htainj^ tracps on the sky." 



34 

The secret source of that myaterious magnetism which inva- 
riably attracts the warm, reverent affection of the {Scottish 
heart to the deathless memory of their country's poet, and 
which will abate no jot of its resistless power while Ben Lo- 
mond stands or the Tweed rolls onward to the sea, lies far 
deeper than the mere sentiment of national pride or passionate 
patriotism. It is not because he delighted to delineate, in their 
own beautiful and expressive dialect, the delicate shades of 
■Scottish feeling, or the peculiarities of thought and manners 
•exhibited in the life of the Scottish peasant. It is HOt because 
his graphic pictures of rural life, his marvellous descriptions of 
local scenery, his resistless bursts of rarest humor, and the ra- 
diant brilliancy of his inimitable flashes of wit are all tinged 
in every lineament with a patriotic pride in the land which 
gave him birth and a deathless love for his native heath. It 
is not for any of these reasons alone, nor yet for all of them 
combined, that Burns occupies the first and highest place in 
the affections of his countrymen. 

It is because he was not simply the poet of Scotland, but the 
poet of humanity everywhere! It is because he possessed, as 
no other poet ever did, the universal alchemy of genius which 
enabled him to bring to light the pure virgin gold in everything 
lie touched. It is because there is not a single fibre in the 
heart of any human being which cannot be touched in some 
way by the simple magic of his unaffected muse. It is be- 
cause the majestic soul exhibited in his artless lays was as ex- 
pansive as his race. As I have seen it somewhere said of him, 
*' Born in obscurity, reared in adversity, rejoicing in the smiles 
of nature, and scorning the frowns of fortune, he lived and 
died the poet of the people — the great unnumbered masses who 
eat their humble bread in the sweat of their own honest brows." 
Other great poets had their own peculiar excellencies. Milton 
awed by a sublimer theme and loftier language; Shakespeare 
deliglited while he instructed mankind in a deeper and a more 
diversified philosophy; Byron challenged admiration by bolder 
and wilder flights of the imagination; but the Scottish peasant 
stands alone and peerless in painting the joys and the sorrows, 
the agonies and the transports of the humble sphere in which 
he lived. Of all lyric poets the most prolific and versatile, the 
simplest and the most touching, and to his own class the truest 
and the most elevating. Aye, the most elevating! "Holy 
Willie " will always elevate his sanctimonious nose at the 
*' Jolly Beggars. " He will never cease to point his pharisaical 
linger at " honest Tam O'Shanter " and " Souter Johnnie," and 
you may take your " Bible oath " that whenever he recurs to the 
•scene at *'Poosie Nancy's," or when "Willie brewed a peck 
o' mant, and Rab and Allan cam to pree," he will turn up the 
whites of his pious eyes in " holy rapture," and exclaim : 

"I bless an' praise thy matchless might, 
Whan thousands thou hast left in night, 



35 

That I am here afore thy sight, 

For gifts and grace, 
A burnin' and a shinin' light 

To a' this place. 

" Yet I am here, a chosen sample; 
To show thy grace is great an' ample; 
I'm here a pillar in thy temple. 

Strong as a rock, 
A guide, a buckler, an' example, 

To a' thy flock." 

Yet there is a fervid piety pervading every line of the " Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night," of which such canting hypocrites are 
as utterly ignorant as the inhabitant of the farthest hill-top of 
Nova Zembla is of the perfumed zephyrs that sigh through the 
flowery vales of Araby the blest. There is a purity of senti- 
ment, a refinement of feeling, and a delicacy of thought in 
the address to the "Wee, modest crimson- tipped flower," of 
which such thin-blooded, hollow-hearted, soulless shams have 
no more conception than a milestone has of the sublimest 
symphonies of Mozart or Mendelsshon. When I speak of the 
elevating influence of Burns' poetry, however, I do not allude 
simply to those marvellously beautiful scintillations of thought 
or those exquisitely delicate expressions of refined and ennob- 
ling sentiments which are found scattered like unstrung dia- 
monds through almost everything that ever emanated from his- 
pen, but to the dignity of the manhood which beams out of 
almost every line he ever wrote. 

He has been called the poet of the poor. Not because he 
spent his genius in piteous wailing for the hardships and 
miseries of the millions whose lives are doomed to a ceaseless 
round of toil; not because he taught them to repine at their 
condition, nor yet to despise or envy the advantages of rank 
and wealth and culture, but because he taught them to realize 
the dignity and majesty of their own nature, and to stand erect 
in the image of their Creator. It is this sublime philosophy^ 
this grand pivotal idea in all the creations of his genius, that 
makes him truly the poet of humanity everywhere, and ren- 
ders his name and memory sacred, not only with his own 
countrymen, but with honest, high-minded, whole-soulled men 
everywhere. 

There is another particular in which Burns has been rarely,, 
if ever, equalled, and which renders his poetry peculiarly 
fascinating to all classes of men and to every grade of the hu- 
man intellect; I mean its aphoristic character— the wealth of 
wisdom he sometimes puts up in the smallest packages. For 
example, out of the innumerable instances which might be 
cited, what could possibly be more expressive of the utter un- 
certainty of all human calculations than his simple line: 

"The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley." 



Where can be a more siingiDg rebuke to kuman vanity and 
self-conceit than in his oft-quoted ejaculation — 

"Oh, wad some power the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us?" 

In the simple power of word-painting — no, not painting, but 
that marvellous faculty of producing a real life-picture by a 
few rapid strokes of his magic pencil — Burns was never ap- 
proached by any other poet that ever lived on earth. As an 
illustration of this I will pass by his universally acknowledged 
master-pieces and select at random a single sketch from his al- 
most illimitable gallery. Take, for instance, a single iverse- 
from the address " To a Haggis:" 

" His knife see rustic labor dight 
And cut you up wi' ready slight, 
Trenching your gushing entrails bright 

Like eny ditch; 
And then, oh, what a glorious sight, 

Warm-reekin', rich!" 

Can't you see the delicious, tempting dish steaming before 
them ? Does not the delightful odor it exhales upon the sur- 
rounding air make your very mouth water ? Then see the 
auld guidman and his " buirdly cheels," armed with their horn 
spoons, rushing to the attack : 

" Then horn for horn they stretch and strive, 
De'il tak' the hindmost, on they drive, 
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve 

Are bent like drums ; 
Then auld guidman, maist like to rive, 
' Bethankit ' hums." 

Why, Tennyson's world-renowned description of the charge 
of the six hundred at Balaklava cannot compare with it. 

There is yet another peculiarity in which Burns stands with- 
out a parallel in the annals of poetic literature, and that is in 
the simple, unaffected patriotism and the manly pride in his 
own class which crops out in almost every sentence that flowed 
from his untutored pen. I need go no further for an illustra- 
tion of this than the very poem from which! have just quoted, 
where he contrasts the child of affluence, reared on dainty 

viands, and the hardy, haggis-fed peasant of his native heather. 
Look at this picture : 

" Poor devil ! See him owre his trash. 
As feckless as a wither'd rash, 
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash. 

His nieve a nit ; 
Thro' bloody flood or field to dash. 

Oh how unfit ! 

But mark the rustic, haggis-fed. 

The trembling earth resounds his tread. 



37 

Clap in his walie nieve a blade, 

He'll mak' it whissle ; 
And legs, and arms, and heads will sued, 

Like taps o' thrissle. " 

Nevertheless, as I have already said, maukind will uever 
consent that Burns shall be monopolized by a single nation. 
Humanity loves and claims him. Vast as would be the chasm 
in the literature of his own country if the glorious offspring of 
his genius were stricken from it, vaster stifl would be the void 
in the universal heart of man if the wide space filled by the 
memory of Burns would be empty ; a memory which will 
grow brighter and yet brighter until time itself shall wax old 
as doth a garment, and the heavens be rolled together as a 
scroll. 



Extract from an Elegy to the memory of Robert Burns. 

BY ALEX. BALFOUE. 

" Yet rest in peace. Thou gentle shade. 

Although the ' narrow house ' be thine, 
No pious rite shall pass unpaid. 
No hands unhallowed stain thy shrine. 

'* The blighting breath of venomed scorn 
Shall harmless round thy mansion rave; 
Though Envy plant her poignant thorn, 
It ne'er shall bud above thy grave. 

" The stagnant soul, unmoved, may hear 
Of worth it ne'er was formed to feel; 
The selfish heart, with haughty sneer, 
Unblushing boast a breast of steel: 

" Yet sympathy, that loves to sigh, 
And Pity, sweet celestial maid, 
And Genius, with her eagle eye. 
Shall hover r®uud thy hallowed shade. 

" But still, officious friends, beware! 

Nor rashly wound my favorite's fame; 
O, watch it with parental care! 
Stain not the hapless Minstrel's name. 

" Seek not, amidst his wreath to twine, 
One verse that he himself suppressed; 
His offerings made at folly's shrine, 
Let them in dark oblivion rest! 

This poem in full, consisting of fifty-four verses, may be found 
in James Grant Wilson's Poets and Poetry of Scotland, recently 
published by Harper Bros. 



38 



BURNS. 

To a Rose, brought from near Alloivay Kirk, in Ayrshire, in the autumn 
of 1%ZZ. 

Wild Rose of Alloway ! my thanks ; 

Thou 'mindst me of that autumn 
noon 
When first we met upon " the banks 

And braes o' bonny Doon." 

Like thine, beneath the thorn-tree's 
bough. 
My sunny hour was glad and brief, 
We've crossed the winter sea, and 
thou 
Art withered — flower and leaf. 

And will not thy death-doom be mine — 

The doom of all things wrought of 
clay — 
And withered my lif<i's leaf like thine, 

Wild rose of Alloway? 

Not so his memory, for whose sake 

My bosom bore thee far and long. 
His — who a humbler flower could 
'make 

Immortal as his song. 

The memory of Burns — a name 

That calls, when brimmed her fes- 
tal cup, 
A nation's glory and her shame, 

In silent sadness up. 

A nation's glory — be the rest 

Forgot — she's canonized his mind ; 
And it is joy to speak the best 

We may of human kind. 

I've stood beside the cottage bed 

Where the Bard-peasant first drew 
breath ; 
A straw-thatched roof above his head, 

A straw-wrought couch beneath. 

And I have stood beside the pile, 

His monument— that tells to Heaven 
The homage of earth's proudest isle 

To that Bard-peasant given ! 

Bid thy thoughts hover o'er that spot, 

Boy-Minstrel, in thy dreaming 
hour ; 
And know, however low his lot, 

A Poet's pride and power. 

The pride that lifted Burns from earth, 

The power that gave a child of song 
Ascendency o'er rank and birth. 

The rich, the brave, the strong ; 

And if despondency weigh down 

Thy spirit's fluttering pinions then. 
Despair — thy name is written on 

The roll of common men. 



There have been loftier themes than 
his. 

And longer scrolls, and louder lyres. 
And lays lit up with Poesy's 

Purer and holier fires : 

Vet read the names that know not 
death ; [there ; 

Few nobler ones than Burns are 
And few have won a greener wreath 

Than that which binds his hair. 

His is that language of the heart. 
In which the answering heart would 
speak, [tear start, 

Thought, word, that bids the warm 
Or the smile light the cheek ; 

And his that music, to whose tone 
The common pulse of man keeps 
time. 

In cot or castle's mirth or moan, 
In cold or sunny clime. 

And who hath heard his song, nor 
knelt 

Before its spell with willing knee. 
And listened, and believed, and felt 

The Poet's mastery. 

O'er the mind's sea, in calm and 

storm, [showers. 

O'er the heart's sunshine and its 

O'er Passion's moments bright and 

warm, 

O'er Reason's dark, cold hours ; 

On fields where brave men " die or 
do," 
In halls where rings the banquet's 
mirth. 
Where mourner's weep, where lovers 
woo, 
. From throne to cottage hearth ? 

What sweet tears dim the eyes unshed. 
What wild vows falter on the tongue, 

When " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace 
bled," 
Or " Auld Lang Syne " is sung ! 

Pure hopes, that lift the soul above. 
Come with his Cotter's hymn of 
praise, 
And dreams of youth, and truth, and 
love, 
With " Logan's " banks and braes. 

And when he breathes his master-lay 
Of Alloway's witch-haunted wall. 

All passions in our frames of clay 
Come thronging at his call. 



39 



Imagination's world of air, [glee, 
And our own world, its gloom and 

Wit, pathos, poetry, are there. 
And death's sublimity. 

And Burns — though brief the race he 
ran, [trod. 

Though rough and dark the path he 
Lived — died — in form and soul a Man, 

The image of his God. 

Through care and pain, and want, and 
wo, [heal. 

With wounds that only death could 
Tortures — the poor alone can know, 

The proud alone can feel ; 

He kept his honesty and truth. 
His independent tongue and pen. 

And moved, in manhood as in youth. 
Pride of his fellow men. 

Strong sense, deep feeling, passions 
strong, 

A hate of tyrant and of knave, 
A love of right, a scorn of wrong. 

Of coward and of slave. 

A kind true heart, a spirit high. 
That could not fear and would not 
bow, 

Were written in his manly eye 
And on his manly brow. 

Praise to the bard ! his words are 
driven, [sown, 

Like flower-seeds by the far winds 
Where'er beneath the sky of heaven, 

The birds of fame have flown. 

Praise to the man ! a nation stood 
Beside his coffin with wet eyes. 

Her brave, her beautiful, her good. 
As when a loved one dies. 

And still, as on his funeral day. 
Men stand his cold earth-couch 
around. 

With the mute homage that we pay 
To consecrated ground. 



And oonsecrated ground it is. 
The last the hallowed home of one 

Who lives upon all memories, 
Though with the buried gone. 

Such graves as his are pilgrim's 
shrines. 
Shrines to no code or creed con- 
fined — 
The Delphian vales, the Palestines, 
The Meccas of the mind. 

Sages with wisdom'sgarlandSvreathed, 
Crowned kings, and mitred priests 
of power, 
And warriors with their bright sword 
sheathed, 
j The mightiest of the hour; 

I And lowlier names, whose humble 
I home 

! Is lit by Fortune's dimmer star. 
And there — o'er wave and mountain 
come. 
From countries near and far ; 

Pilgrims whose wandering feet have 
pressed 
The Switzer's snow, the Arab's 
sand. 
Or trod the piled leaves of the West, 
My own green forest-land. 

All ask the cottage of his birth. 

Gaze on the scenes he loved and 
sung. 

And gather feelings not of earth 
His fields and streams among. 

They linger by the Boon's low trees. 
And pastoral Nith, and wooded 
Ayr, 

And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries ! 
The poet's tomb is there. 

But what to them the sculptor's art. 
His funeral columns, wreaths and 
urns ? 

Wear they not graven on the heart 
The name of Robert Burns ? 



40 



ODE TO THE MEMORY OF BURNS. 



BY THOMAS CAMPBELL. 



Soul of the Poet ! wheresoe'er, 
Reclaimed from earth, thy genius 

plume 
Her wings of immortality : 
Suspend thy harp in happier sphere. 
And with thine influence illume 
The gladness of our jubilee. 

And fly like fiends from secret spell. 
Discord and strife, at Burns' name, 
Exorcised by his memory ; 
For he was chief of bards that swell 
The heart with songs of social flame, 
And high delicious revelry. 

And love's own strain tohim was given 
To warble all its ecstacies 

wiU'd— 
With Pythian words unsought, un- 
Love, the surviving gift of Heaven, 
The choicest sweet of Paradise, 
In life's else bitter cup distill'd. 

Who that has melted o'er his lay 
To Mary's soul, in heaven above. 
But pictured sees, in fancy strong, 
The landscape and the livelong day 
That smiled upon their mutual love ? — 
Who that has felt forgets the song? 

Nor skill' d one flame alone to fan : 
His country's high-soul' d peasantry 
What patriot-pride he taught ! — how 

much 
To weigh the inborn worth of man ! 
And rustic life and poverty 
Grow beautiful beneath his touch. 

Him, in his clay-built cot, the Muse 
Entranced, and show'd him all the 

forms 
Of fairy light and wizard gloom 
(That only gifted Poet views,) 
The genii of the floods and storms. 
And martial shades from Glory's tomb. 

On Bannock-field what thoughts 

arouse 
The swain whom Burns' song in- 
spires ! 
Beat not his Caledonian veins. 
As o'er th' heroic turf he ploughs. 
With all the spirit of his sires, 
And all their scorn of death and chains? 

And see the Scottish exile, tann'd 
By many a far and foreign clime. 



Bend o'er his home-born verse, and 

weep 
In memory of his native land, 
With love that scorns the lapse of time. 
And lies that stretch beyond the deep ! 

Encamp'd by Indian rivers wild. 
The soldier, resting on his arms, 
In Burns' carol sweet recalls 
The scenes that blessed him when a 

child. 
And glows and gladdens at the charms 
Of Scotia's woods and waterfalls. 

Oh deem not, 'midst this worldly strife, 
An idle art the Poet brings : 
Let high Philosophy control 
And sages calm the stream of life, 
'Tis he refines its fountain-springs. 
The nobler passions of the soul. 

It is the Muse that consecrates 
The native banner of the brave, 
Unfurling, at the trumpet's breath. 
Rose, thistle, harp; 'tis she elates 
To sweep the field or ride the wave, 
A sunburst in the storm of death ! 

And thou, young hero, when thy pall 
Is cross'd with mournful sword and 

plume. 
When public grief begins to fade. 
And only tears of kindred fall. 
Who but the Bard shall dress thy tomb. 
And greet with fame thy gallant shade! 

Such was the soldier — Burns, forgive 
That sorrows of mine own intrude 
In strains to thy great memory due. 
In verse like thine, oh ! could he live. 
The friend I mourn'd — the braye, the 

good — 
Edward that died at Waterloo ! 

Farewell, high chief of Scottish song ! 
That couldst alternately impart 
Wisdom and rapture in thy page, 
And brand each vice with satire strong. 
Whose lines are mottoes of the heart. 
Whose truths electrify the sage. 

Farewell ! and ne'er may envy dare 
To wring one baleful poison-drop 
From the crush'd laurels of thy bust : 
But while the lark sings sweet in air. 
Still may the grateful pilgrim stop. 
To bless the spot that holds thy dust. 



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